OCZ Colossus 3.5-in Solid State Drive Review

Introduction and Packaging

Introduction

It's been a bumpy road for the OCZ Colossus. We caught our first glimpse of it back in June, and posted up some exclusive early testing data and pricing back in July.
Samples arrived at our storage lab a few months back and we've spent much time evaluating firmware performance. Shipping firmware arrived on another unit and we've been evaluating it for the last few weeks.

The Colossus is OCZ's first 3.5" form factor SSD. It consists of 4 (!) Indilinx controllers ganged together by a network of Silicon Image RAID processors. These are only 2-channel controllers, so they link the Indilinx controllers to a single SATA link in a 4-2-1 channel configuration consisting of 3 SI 5923 chips.

Block diagram of the Silicon Image 5923 SATA RAID processor.

The benching is done and our sample has been sufficiently tortured. We now present our findings for your reading pleasure.

Packaging

The Colossus arrived in a simple box with no paperwork, likely because such documentation was not ready for productions with our pre-release sample.

We also noted the capacity is not noted on the outside of the drive. Our review sample is a 256GB model.